Russian Billionaire's Presidential Bid Makes His Sister a Star

Irina Prokhorova, a sister of Russian billionaire and President candidate Mikhail Prokhorov, in her office in 2011.Credit
Dmitry Kostyukov for the International Herald Tribune

MOSCOW — The presidential candidacy of the Russian billionaire Mikhail D. Prokhorov created an unexpected new political star in Russia: his older sister, Irina.

Last month, she flummoxed Nikita Mikhalkov, the Oscar-winning film director, scion of czarist and Soviet aristocracy, and active supporter of Vladimir V. Putin, in a nationally televised debate. Since Mr. Putin had refused to participate in debates, sending proxies instead, Mr. Prokhorov responded in kind, dispatching his sister.

Mr. Mikhalkov, who is never at a loss for words and has alienated many with his palpable sense of entitlement, sat in stunned silence for parts of the broadcast. At the end, he paid perhaps the ultimate compliment in a society that has little regard for women and features few women at the top of any structure.

“If you were running for president together with your brother,” he said, “I would vote for you.”

If her brother, who at 46 is Russia’s third richest man and the 32nd wealthiest person in the world, epitomizes the stereotype of the post-Soviet playboy oligarch, Ms. Prokhorova, 56, is anything but his bimbo counterpart.

Before the debate with Mr. Mikhalkov on Feb. 13, she was widely known only in the narrow circle that still prizes literature over the pervasive pop culture that now dominates Russian media and much of public discourse.

She studied English and American literature at the prestigious Moscow State University in the Soviet era, and in 1992 founded New Literary Observer, or NLO, one of the first intellectual journals and publishing houses in independent Russia. She was awarded a State Prize of the Russian Federation in 2003 by Mr. Putin, honoring NLO as “Best Educational Project.”

In 2004, she founded the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation with her brother after he became director of Norilsk Nickel, the Arctic metals producer. She still runs the foundation, which initially supported culture and civil society in the Norilsk region but has since broadened its reach and spends 400 million rubles, or $13.6 million, a year.

During the debate with Mr. Mikhalkov, she bemoaned the neglect of provincial culture and regional libraries in Russia during Mr. Putin’s rule and politely but firmly cut down the film director’s religiosity. She defended her brother as a patriot with a civic conscience and defended his right not to be married, saying that he is holding out for true love.

“When you start to travel the country and see and see the state of the country, how talented people can’t pull themselves out of poverty, then a certain spirit of civic duty appears,” she told Mr. Mikhalkov, mocking what she said was a popular view that “a talented director can be a citizen, but a talented businessman can’t be a citizen.”

Twitterers dubbed her “the Russian Angela Merkel” and suggested that she be minister of culture. Others praised her excellent spoken Russian, which is rarely heard in public these days.

Ms. Prokhorova seemed shy about the attention at first, but when asked in an interview about the comparison to Mrs. Merkel, she responded instantly, saying with a broad smile, “Why not Margaret Thatcher?”

In the office of New Literary Observer, surrounded by books it has published on the evolution of Russian cultural and historical thought, she said she was acutely aware of her image.

“People usually imagine the sister of an oligarch as a Botoxed woman swathed in furs,” said Ms. Prokhorova, who favors casual pant suits and a sensible haircut.

Photo

Irina Prokhorova, at left, and her brother, Russian billionaire and President candidate Mikhail Prokhorov, at right, during Prokhorov's presidential campaign in February 2011.Credit
Dmitry Kostyukov for the International Herald Tribune

She apologized profusely for being late — a common occurrence in traffic-clogged Moscow — explaining that nearby streets had been closed “so our ‘chieftain’ could pass,” a mocking reference to Mr. Putin.

In an hourlong conversation, she easily handled any question with references to Russian and Soviet history and the development of civil society — a pet theme of articles, books and conferences produced by NLO — and a central tenet, along with culture, of Mr. Prokhorov’s campaign.

She said charges that Mr. Prokhorov was a “Kremlin project,” an officially sanctioned decoy to corral and distract liberal voters, failed to take into account the historic trajectory of political activism in Russia. “It’s traditional for Russians to talk about politics,” she said. “He thought about this a great deal,” and Ms. Prokhorova said she had often discussed politics with her brother. “I think it was a logical path for any truly intelligent, thoughtful and successul person,” she said.

In an interview in 2009, she also defended her brother — who was better known at the time as the man once detained in the French ski resort of Courchevel on suspicion of flying in prostitutes — as educated and engaged.

“It’s probably immodest to praise my own brother, but I can say that he is a highly intellectual person,” she said then. “It’s a kind of myth that you can wake up and suddenly become rich.”

At a campaign event on Feb. 25 at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Mr. Prokhorov said that “classical Russian literature is the main moral pillar” of Russian society and joked with a voter who called herself one of the creative intelligentsia, suggesting that she would probably like to see his sister as president.

In a video of the official announcement of his candidacy, Mr. Prokhorov thanked his sister, “who supports me in everything I do.”

Until recently, even many who knew about Ms. Prokhorova never suspected that she is Mr. Prokhorov’s sister, so different are their images. But as both have become more public figures, it has become clear that they are exceptionally close, a fact that they don’t hide.

Ms. Prokhorova is a decade older and two heads shorter than Mr. Prokhorov. Their parents died within nine months of each other when Mr. Prokhorov was 23. Ms. Prokhorova divorced years ago, and her brother helped raise her daughter.

Brother and sister share a mansion in an elite Moscow suburb. A little over a decade ago, when he was already phenomenally rich, he continued to live in his parents’ Soviet-era apartment.

In a profile in the February issue of Snob, a magazine Mr. Prokhorov founded and finances that is aimed at upper-middle-class intellectuals, he said the one time he had fought with his sister and moved out was when she surprised him by renovating his room, which had been furnished by his parents when he was 11 years old.

A few days before the presidential vote on Sunday, Ms. Prokhorova sat at her brother’s right hand as he presented his party’s program. She was in charge of arts and cultural policy, and she had a white ribbon, the symbol of the opposition, tied to her purse.

Later that day, she was one of Mr. Prokhorov’s supporters in a nationally televised debate with Vladimir V. Zhirinovsky, the nationalist presidential candidate who ranted about the intelligentsia being to blame for the state of Russia. Earlier in the debate he had raged against Alla Pugachyeva, Russia’s most famous pop singer, who also supports Mr. Prokhorov.

That same day, Ms. Prokhorova spoke about education policy on her brother’s behalf at the Public Chamber, a Kremlin-sponsored civil society umbrella group, telling a schoolteacher from the Urals who asked her about patriotic education “to cut it out with the mysticism.” Russia, Ms. Prokhorova declared, needs to decide whether it wants to be a totalitarian society or an open society.

At NLO, Ms. Prokhorova held a copy of “Angry Observers,” a book she published after the disputed Dec. 4 parliamentary election. The book includes testimony from witnesses to election fraud, and she said it is a historical record and one of her most successful projects. Voters were snapping it up, she said, to learn how to observe future ballots.

As for her own political future, she said she rules nothing out. “My life and that of my friends,” she said, “has changed unexpectedly so many times.”